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Chief Executive's message

Welcome to our website and to the Employers' Forum

Tomorrow's sustainable companies will be those who create conditions where all individuals, whether employees, customers, suppliers, or investors, want to and are enabled to channel their skills, experience and energies towards business success. These companies will be effective in creating business processes that overcome the disabling effects of discrimination and, where they exist, individual impairments. Such companies will build their capacity to employ disabled people, service the needs of disabled customers and their allies, and thereby enhance their overall ability to compete in an increasingly complex, diverse market place.

We are currently seeing an historic shift, from the days when disability was a peripheral issue, to a point where we can truthfully say that it has come of age.

There are still many miles to travel and many misconceptions to clear up, but disability is now recognised as an issue of equality and social justice. Equal rights are now as inextricably linked to disability as they are to race and gender.

These issues are not merely connected in some impersonal, legal or bureaucratic sense. They are linked in the minds of influential people within the nations business life, people charged with making workplaces a better and fairer environment.

It is first and foremost disabled people themselves who have been enormously influential in negotiating this change of heart; in particular they have helped shift the way legislators and people in positions of power and influence look at the issue.

I am very proud of the part the Forum has played, working with business and public sector employers to inform, persuade and encourage this fundamental change.

I would like to thank and congratulate all those organisations, who through their membership of the Forum are doing so much to ensure that everyone is included in the organisations of tomorrow.

Susan Scott-Parker, Chief Executive